Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte — Complete vs The Count of Monte Cristo
Both counted from their full texts, the same way, on the same day.
24,418words between them — 1h 38m of it
Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte — Complete is longer — 489,307 words against 464,889 for The Count of Monte Cristo, a difference of 24,418 words or about 1h 38m of extra reading. The Count of Monte Cristo is the harder read, at grade 11.8 against 11.4.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions counted the same way·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Side by side
| Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte — Complete | The Count of Monte Cristo | |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Bourrienne, Louis Antoine Fauvelet de | Dumas, Alexandre |
| Words | 489,307 | 464,889 |
| Reading time at 250 wpm | 32h 37m | 31h 00m |
| Unique words | 19,464 | 16,573 |
| Sentences | 20,726 | 16,360 |
| Average sentence length | 23.6 words | 28.4 words |
| Reading grade | 11.4 | 11.8 |
| Reading ease | 55.6 | 60.7 |
| Long words | 13.3% | 8.9% |
Highlighted cells are the larger figure — except reading ease, where higher means easier.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·both editions, same counting rule·REVIEWED JUL 2026
How this is worked out
- Both texts are counted the same way, from the same source, with Gutenberg's header and licence footer struck first.
- The gap is stated in words and then in time at 250 words a minute — the rate is printed because a duration without one cannot be checked.
- Difficulty is compared on Flesch–Kincaid grade, which reads sentence and word length only. It cannot see irony or dialect, so treat it as a measure of surface, not of effort.
gap = |489,307 − 464,889| = 24,418 words 24,418 ÷ 250 wpm = 1h 38m of extra reading
The second question
Which is longer, Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte — Complete or The Count of Monte Cristo?
Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte — Complete is longer — 489,307 words against 464,889 for The Count of Monte Cristo, a difference of 24,418 words or about 1h 38m of extra reading. The Count of Monte Cristo is the harder read, at grade 11.8 against 11.4.
Colophon
Both figures computed from Project Gutenberg plain-text editions — ebook no. 3567 and no. 1184 — and from no other source. Neither book’s text is set on this site.
SOURCE·Project Gutenberg full texts·US public domain·REVIEWED JUL 2026
Word counts and reading levels are computed from a specific public-domain edition and will differ from other editions and from other counting methods — see the method page.
